Country Mouse
From my younger daughter’s bedroom, I can spy on three separate bird-feeding stations.
My all-seeing eye detects a sparrowhawk lurking on the roadside hedge of a cottage along the village street. Thanks to a well-replenished bird table, it enjoys rich pickings here (of victims, not bird food).
Some see the sparrowhawk’s new ubiquity as a sign of ecological health, but I see it as a harbinger of doom for our last remaining village house sparrows. It was The Oldie’s own John Mcewen who reminded me, in his engaging new bird anthology A Sparrow’s Life’s as Sweet as Ours, that once numbers fall below a certain level, house sparrows have a suicidal tendency to celibacy.
My relationship with house sparrows goes back to my childhood, when their chirping was the background soundtrack to a semi-rural shire upbringing. Indeed it was a party trick of mine to mimic a sparrow so effectively that I could summon them from the eaves of our brick villa by a sucking motion funnelled through a gap in my teeth; until the fateful day when, for cosmetic reasons, I had my buck teeth ‘improved’ and loss of chirping was the collateral damage.
Chirping sparrows provided the soundtrack to every TV and radio play about the countryside until the 1980s, when producers must have decided that it had ceased to sound authentic. Imbued with a childhood interest in birds, this upbringing imprinted every species onto my formative mind. With my companion hobby, stamp-collecting, a cursory knowledge of exotic birds from overseas, which featured heavily as subject matter on foreign stamps, was also imprinted. On a recent trip to Oz, I astonished the park ranger by recognising the outline of a distantly glimpsed kookaburra before he did. Stamp-collecting is no longer a fashionable hobby because children have beome so intensely image-conscious that a world of casually imbibed knowledge about the fauna of faraway places passes them by.
Shifting baseline theory is the idea that our perspective comes from our own experiences during upbringing, and what we grow up seeing and experiencing is our norm. But in our newly named, manmade geological era, the Anthropocene, no species can be taken for granted.
There are British birds I never spotted even in childhood – the hawfinch and the wryneck achieved near-mythical status – but birdwatching is a habit that stays with you for life, and is perfectly suited to a gentleman of leisure. Correction: ‘a man with a grasshopper mind’.
Suddenly Mary was in the bedroom, chastising me for spying from the window instead of working. The reason I was in there in the first place was that I had finally agreed to her request to Polyfilla the unsightly cavities, where operatives had removed light fittings.
Not for the first time, I had got distracted and the Polyfilla mixture had set rock hard.
Yet – think of Newton and his apple tree – many eureka moments come from the ‘free-wheeling’ mind, and especially to generalist citizen scientists like me whose pursuits and interests, like those of the Prince of Wales, range widely. Making connections is the Prince’s forte and, as a generalist rather than a specialist, he is often proved right. Moreover, while spying, I had been formulating my grand unified theory against feeding wild birds.
Clearly the parson-naturalists of former days got it wrong, especially about bird migration. Theories abounded that birds spent the winter hibernating in a torpid state in holes, in trees, in buildings and under ice at the bottom of lakes; even that they flew to the moon.
I regret that I wasted three years studying Fine Art at Wimbledon instead of studying ecology and environmental sciences in Cambridge where I might have met Rupert Sheldrake, a hero. According to another hero, ant expert E O Wilson, modern biology, in all its bewildering complexity, is the dominant emerging science of the 21st century.
Nevertheless I believe the generalist citizen scientist can still play a useful role, because no one has a monopoly on wisdom. Through patience and timeconsuming observation in my own village, I believe we are on the brink of a local extinction event.
Had I been to Cambridge instead of to Wimbledon, I might have written my dissertation on the unintended consequences of feeding wild birds – ‘killing them with kindness’.
When did the rot start? St Francis of Assisi? Mary Poppins? What began as a kind-hearted impulse has ended in our spending over £200 million per annum on year-round banquets for birds. These figures are positively Corbynian, yet the result is a drop in population. Poor table hygiene is another reason behind the decline, as is the avian obesity crisis which makes sparrows less nimble when the sparrowhawk swoops.
My childhood bird reference book, Every Child’s Book of Birds and Birdwatching by Henry Makowski, has miraculously escaped the ravages of time. I have not read it for 50 years. It contains this revealing passage:
‘Some people might argue that feeding birds during winter is not such a good idea, after all. It is a biological fact that Nature has its own way of regulating the continuity of animal and plant life: during the winter months, the weaklings are eliminated. By feeding birds in the winter, the weak ones are helped to survive and this may be to the detriment of the species as a whole.’
We have been warned.